1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of printing and in particular, to systems and methods to manage display lists.
2. Description of Related Art
Document processing software allows users to view, edit, process, and store documents conveniently. Pages in a document may be displayed on screen exactly as they would appear in print. However, before the document can be printed, pages in the document are often described in a page description language (“PDL”). As used in this application PDL's may include PostScript, Adobe PDF, HP PCL, Microsoft XPS, and variants thereof as well as any other languages used to describe pages in a document. A PDL description of a document provides a high-level description of each page in a document. This PDL description is often translated to a series of lower-level printer-specific commands when the document is being printed.
The translation process from PDL to lower-level printer-specific commands may be complex and depend on the features and capabilities offered by a particular printer. A printer manufacturer will often make several trade-offs in order to optimize printer performance based on available memory, desired print speed, and other cost and performance issues. For example, a manufacturer may choose to limit the maximum resolution of a printer with limited memory in order to improve the throughput of the printer. Because the eventual trade-offs are model specific, the introduction of new printers or upgrades to existing printers often require revisiting the optimization decisions and may even result in a major overhaul of translation algorithms. Consequently, the introduction of new printer models, or upgrades to existing printers, may be more expensive, sub-optimal, and needlessly delayed. Moreover, the optimal use of printer resources allows a more complete exploitation of available printer capability and leads to good performance. Thus, there is a need for flexible and portable general-purpose schemes to translate PDL descriptions of documents to printer-specific commands.